Newly painted automobiles require compounding. The paint process inherently creates a variety of imperfections including dust that includes paint that has dried mid-air within the spray booth and has settled and adhered to the freshly painted surfaces of the vehicle. Through compounding, such imperfections are eliminated through the repeated application of a thick compound paste and its removal by high velocity buffing in a process generally known as “compounding”.
Compounding is generally carried out by squirting compound paste in globs onto a body panel or a small portion of the vehicle and then immediately buffing that portion. The compound paste must only be applied to a small area—as big an area as can be buffed and removed within a short period of time—because if a glob of compound remains on the paint, it will ‘burn’ the paint and can leave a permanent scar in the vehicle's appearance. Accordingly, within the field it is highly inadvisable to apply compound to more than a small portion of the car to avoid burning the paint, and encountering extreme difficulty in removing compound that has dried on the paint.
Even when the compound paste is removed quickly, this process of compounding has inherent limitations and difficulties. Accordingly, it requires much skill and experience to properly compound a newly painted car. It is for this reason that at many body shops it is only the most experienced personnel—often the shop owner—that is trusted to do it. Clearly this creates a production bottleneck that stalls the growth of their businesses.
Generally attempts at solving this problem have been in trying to improve the compounding paste itself. While these units may be suitable for the particular purpose employed, or for general use, they would not be as suitable for the purposes of the present disclosure as disclosed hereafter.
In the present disclosure, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which the present disclosure is concerned.
While certain aspects of conventional technologies have been discussed to facilitate the present disclosure, no technical aspects are disclaimed and it is contemplated that the claims may encompass one or more of the conventional technical aspects discussed herein.